by Bob Spitz
Michael and Catherine, Ronald Reagan’s great-grandparents, along with their children and Michael’s two older brothers, John and Nicholas, set out by train for the unspoiled Midwest—the Iowa Territory—only days after arriving in America. They had read promotional circulars from banks, railroads, and farm-equipment companies lauding generous land grants and peerless weather. “For richness of soil; for beauty of appearance; and for pleasantness of climate, it surpasses any portion of the United States,” one read. The Midwest was where their destiny awaited them. The Reagans, dreamers of big dreams, pushed west into the American frontier, toward the Mississippi River. Packed into the bowels of an overstuffed train, the family traveled overland from New York to Chicago, where they most likely transferred to one of the local lines of the Illinois Central that snaked off to the edges of the frontier. Chicago to Dixon to Galena to Savanna.
Their destination, Fair Haven, Illinois, was far off the beaten track. In most cases, newcomers to America who headed into the heartland had someone—a relative or family contact—waiting to help get them on their feet. Instant shelter was needed on arrival, some means of finding food and other forms of sustenance. There is no record of how the Reagans established their first home. It is reasonable to assume Michael and his two older brothers banded together, using whatever skills they’d learned in Doolis in order to erect suitable shelter. You could cobble together a sod-and-stone cottage no matter where you set down, but that’s where all comparisons to Ireland ended.
Whoever named Fair Haven must have seen it only in the spring. The settlement, if one could call it that, was bleak, desolate, dispiriting in its isolation, a flat prairie outpost in the northwest corner of the state. As the early settlers discovered, the prairie was deceiving—there was nothing to distinguish it across the entire horizon, no hills, no trees, no contour of any kind. It was flat—flat and barren. You could gaze off for twenty miles in any direction and not detect so much as a shadow. Which isn’t to say the area didn’t have its charm. April through June, there were few places more inviting—clear, crisp air; perpetual sunshine; and a landscape that was nature’s masterpiece. But the summer months were brutally hot, racked by fierce, pounding thunderstorms, tornadoes, and flash flooding, and the winters . . . the winters made settlers feel they were being tested by their faith. Long months, short days, temperatures often in single digits, and wild snowstorms made life a brutal battle against the elements. When Michael Reagan arrived in early December 1857, there was little to recommend this godforsaken terrain.
Still, he would learn soon enough that the farmland was incomparable. What blessed the prairie was the luxury of its soil. Only a few hard miles from the Mississippi River, the land conferred the richest river bottom imaginable, black gold. There were already a sizable number of immigrant farmers in the county, drawn there by the generous yield. And game was plentiful, with deer, buffalo, grouse, and prairie chickens roaming wild.
Michael took advantage of the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers such as the Reagans to claim a substantial parcel of federal land for a fair-minded sum—about $1.25 an acre, payable within a year of making application—so long as they lived on it for five years and improved it. These weren’t squatters, but tenacious pioneers who intended to stay and contribute. The government saw it as a way to develop the frontier; Michael Reagan saw it as a good deal. He claimed a small tract—Section 21—in the southern part of Fair Haven, near a post office and a makeshift school. His brothers took adjoining plots, Sections 22 and 23.
By 1858, Fair Haven was a village on the rise. There was enough of a growing population in surrounding Carroll County to support a sawmill, a distillery, and several churches. But for the most part, the families were dependent on their own resolve. They built small, rudimentary log cabins and forged the utensils necessary to cultivate crops: a moldboard plow to scour the tough June grass, a drag and a grain cradle, sharp axes, wedges—all handmade except for a scythe.
Frontier life was hard work—hard and debilitating. There were so many critical necessities: not only a house but a barn, a team of horses, and enough seed to sow the fields, plus a little to put away each month toward the price of a newfangled McCormick reaper. And just as many setbacks: drought, deadly heat waves, grasshopper plagues, locusts. The prairie contributed its own challenges, chief among them the ornery, shoulder-high grass, whose gnarled roots reached “clear to hell,” according to the farmers, and put up more of a struggle than a team of mules. European transplants like Michael Reagan, who worked the fields with rickety wooden plows, felt bullied, terrorized by the soil. Many settlers without the fortitude to tough it out pulled up stakes and moved to more forgiving climes. Michael was luckier—or more capable—than most. By the time the 1860 census was registered, his property was valued at $1,120 and his personal wealth at around $150. By 1870 the combined worth had soared to $3,850—not bad for a man who had begun his new-world dreams with little more than the shirt on his back. He and his brothers shared sixteen acres of arable land, which over the years returned an ample yield. In nearby Savanna, the so-called emporium for all of Carroll County, the Reagans joined farmers within a thirty-mile radius who swapped crops for provisions, often on credit—“buy and pay after harvest” was the rule—giving them the breathing room to bridge the growing seasons.
Michael and Catherine were prudent and practical. Not idealists, not gamblers, not wishful thinkers, they understood the reality of the prairie, its exacting demands. Like their neighbors, they lived modestly, raising a few dozen chickens to complement a string of milk cows, and planting little more than what they needed to get by: corn, wheat, vegetables, and soybeans. The land was good to them, and they put everything they had back into the land while raising children, five in all, and sending them to school.
But farm life was punishing. Up before dawn, still at it after dusk, they worked constantly, and there were no guarantees. It was a never-ending struggle to keep a farm above water. Farmers’ children who spent their youths performing a litany of routine chores grew restless and often took the first road out. Moving to town was, for them, a liberation. Among the five children of Michael Reagan and Catherine Mulcahy Reagan, only William, the youngest boy, remained at home, where he died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. Thomas, the eldest son, moved to Savanna and found work as a car repairman for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad. John, Ronald Reagan’s grandfather, moved to nearby Fulton, Illinois, a riverboat boomtown on the eastern banks of the Mississippi, where he married a local woman, Jennie Cusick, and went to work at one of the Third Street grain elevators opposite the railroad. Margaret, known as Maggie, and her sister Mary also wound up in Fulton, where in the spring of 1886 they opened a store on the corner of Base and Cherry streets, selling exquisite “millinery and fancy dry goods.”
Having broken free of the farm, Michael Reagan’s offspring prospered, but their lives would be marred by tragic blows.
Thomas, who had a wife and three children, enjoyed running skiffs on the river. On July 4, 1889, he and six of his fellow CM&StP workers celebrated the holiday by sailing to one of the outer islands for a little bacchanal. While rowing back to town, lighthearted and tipsy, according to a newspaper account, “the party began skylarking and rocked the boat so that it was half full of water.” Thomas, positioned at one of the oars, tried to rein in the horseplay, but thirty yards from shore they capsized. A nearby skiff raced to the scene, pulling the struggling men to safety, but Thomas, a nonswimmer, and two others drowned.
Six months later, Maggie kept an evening appointment to visit one of her customers, forgetting to blow out one of the table lamps in the store. While she was out, the lamp exploded, “setting fire to a pile of velvet and untrimmed hats.” Fortunately, O. G. Baldwin, the owner of a dry-goods emporium around the corner, was passing by. He was able to throw “a few pails of water” on the fire before it spread from store to store. But the damage was done; m
ost of the stock was destroyed. If there was a silver lining to the mishap, it was Maggie’s portentous introduction to O. G. Baldwin, who would become her husband. For the time being, however, the fire put the Reagan sisters out of business.
Oddly enough, John Reagan, the young son who hated farmwork, didn’t shrink from the rigors of the Fulton grain elevator. The daily grind inside those rank, sweaty silos was subhuman—and dangerous. The job was rife with tales of stevedores getting caught in the flow of grain or coal and, in one brief and terrible moment, disappearing under tons of spill-off. John managed to avoid such a fate.
John’s bad luck stemmed from fragile health. From the outset, Jennie, a frail, withdrawn woman, struggled with fatigue and infirmity. Nevertheless, she was eager to begin a family. But the birth of each new child left her worn to a shadow. After the couple’s first two children arrived, John moved the family to a more favorable location, building a two-story shingled house that sat atop a gentle rise on Seventh Avenue so that Jennie would be within shouting distance of their doctor, Henry Kennedy, who lived just down the hill. In 1883, the third of their four children, John Edward (known as Jack), was born: Ronald Reagan’s father.
Two years later, after the youngest, Annie, arrived, Jennie’s condition deteriorated. She developed a chronic cough and began losing weight. Her symptoms took “an unfavorable change” around Thanksgiving 1886, when her breathing grew labored and the wrenching night sweats began. The symptoms consuming her were all too evident: tuberculosis, “a fatal disease.” She lasted another two weeks.
Somehow, John Reagan managed to care for four children, two boys and two girls, the youngest of whom was only nineteen months old. There is every indication he tried his best to cope with the situation and that he had plenty of help. His two sisters lived a short distance away, as did his mother, who moved in with her daughters after the death of Michael in March 1884.
But it was an uphill battle. Soon after Jennie passed, tiny Annie contracted whooping cough, which damaged her auditory nerves, leading to the permanent loss of hearing and speech. Although for some time John maintained a balance between the frenetic demands of work and his needy household, it took a toll on his health. He came home from long spells in the grain elevator feeling exhausted and running a fever. Days off with bed rest failed to improve his condition. The work-related stress brought on bouts of nausea, wild swings of temperature, and the sweats. By mid-1888, reports that John was seriously ill, even “failing,” circulated in Fulton, and by Christmas the worst was acknowledged. No one needed Dr. Kennedy to confirm that John’s symptoms mirrored those of his wife: the fatal grip of tuberculosis had taken hold.
Jack Reagan, Ronald’s father, was only five years old when he watched his father grapple with the inescapable. It was a solemn New Year’s in 1889, as his father lay wasted, eyes sunken and cheeks emaciated, gasping for breath and coughing up blood until his heart finally gave out. His death on January 10 had repercussions into the next generation. As an obituary in the Fulton newspaper lamented, “John Reagan, aged thirty-four years, seven months and ten days . . . leaves four children under ten years of age.”
The family, what was left of it, was thrown into flux. Jack and his siblings moved in for a while with his aunts and grandmother, three strong-willed and resourceful women. Soon, Jack was the only child living at home. An older sister, Katie, moved out when Aunt Mary married; little Annie was placed in a state institution for the deaf and dumb; and Will, now a sulky, diffident teenager, packed in school to work in the grain elevator.
While his aunts worked long hours at their recently rebuilt millinery shop, Jack spent plenty of time on his own. Fulton was a kind of riverside Dodge City, intoxicating to a boy his age. Bootlegging, smuggling, and prostitution were part of its gritty underbelly. Situated on a channel called the Narrows, named for its position at the most tapered part of the river, Fulton was an early key crossroads of the upper Mississippi River Valley. Commercial cargo of all types, especially lumber, made its way downriver from Wisconsin and Minnesota, then was loaded onto one of the railroads that scissored through town. The Chicago Northwestern, the Burlington Northern, and the CB&Q (Chicago, Burlington & Quincy) merged their lines in Fulton. Such a busy Midwestern hub became a magnet for undesirables. “Those riverboat crews were tough characters,” says a longtime resident who resented the riffraff. Taverns along the banks serviced the men from the steamships and logging boats that tied up on the docks.
Those establishments would have a significant impact on Jack Reagan’s adolescence.
Aunt Maggie, by that time, was on Jack’s case. Her marriage to O. G. Baldwin in 1894 provided an opportunity for a change of scenery. In 1896, Orson G. Baldwin, one of Fulton’s most prominent merchants and local legislators, decided to close his emporium and move inland, across the Mississippi to Bennett, Iowa. Jack, who had just turned thirteen, was coming with them.
To Jack, Bennett was a punishment, in the middle of nowhere, little more than a train stop created by the railroads, halfway between Clinton and Cedar Rapids, a scattering of houses on a grid of muddy, unpaved streets. Why O. G. Baldwin chose to drag a new wife and ward to this scrubby outpost was anyone’s guess. Perhaps he saw it as a timely opportunity to capitalize on frontier expansion. The eastern corridor of Iowa, from Davenport down to Burlington, was growing at a terrific rate. A wily tradesman such as O. G. might have recognized an opening. Or perhaps he wanted to get away from the sprawl. Bennett had no river, no scoundrels, no tavern culture.
One can only imagine Jack Reagan’s sense of displacement. To a thirteen-year-old with a high-spirited streak, Bennett was lifeless, the heartland without an identifiable heartbeat. From its depot, one could take in the whole depressing square: a few general stores, a small hotel, a stockyard with several butchers, a barbershop, and a pool hall. The majority of families who settled there were stolid German Lutherans, not the Irish who had shaped Jack’s world. He soon made it clear that he was no scholar, and by the sixth grade he dropped out of school, leaving him free to help clerk in the family store located in the new bank building at Third and Main, and to play baseball.
Since the end of the Civil War, baseball had become grouted in the American mosaic and was already considered “the national pastime.” Every town in the country, no matter its size or location, refashioned a grassy patch into a makeshift baseball diamond, where kids of all ages played the game. Jack found his footing on the local Bennett ballfield, playing right field for the Junior Tigers and acting as their manager. Jaunty and gangly in his navy-blue team jacket and pinstriped cap, Jack took the field for each week’s games with lively dispatch, an unconventional teenager who stood out from his teammates with a cheeky hairstyle parted down the middle. The sparkle in his eye was impossible to miss. If anyone wondered how Ronald Reagan grew to love the sport, his enthusiasm for it can be traced directly to his father.
Jack’s job clerking at Baldwin’s Dry-Goods was mundane at best, though it did put fifty cents a week in his pocket, enough to finance a ticket to the wrestling matches—or for a drink from one of the three kegs of beer smuggled weekly into the bone-dry town. But there was no future in his uncle’s store. By 1901, it was hardly turning a respectable profit, and after only five years in business, and with several dry-goods stores opening within a few blocks, the Baldwins decided to close up shop. Jack was eighteen. He opened a lunch counter for a while, but after a few weeks of scant foot traffic, he packed up and returned to Fulton on his own, taking a clerk’s job at the J. W. Broadhead store.
Broadhead’s, in the middle of town, was a “quite well-respected” Fulton institution. A grand brick structure on the corner of Fourth Street and Tenth Avenue, it was the forerunner of the modern department store, several floors comprised of individual departments—men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, a boutique for hats, bolts of the most soignée fabric imported from Chicago, housewares, and notions, such as candles, umbrellas, perf
ume, and sewing supplies.
Jack found his calling on Broadhead’s mezzanine level in the smart women’s shoe department, overlooking men’s furnishings, where he developed a flair for fitting the female foot. He harnessed the powers of his genial nature, his gift of gab, and his intuitive salesmanship into a profession that would occupy him for the next twenty-five years. He was well-suited for the job. Jack cut a “tall, swarthy, muscular, and handsome” figure, stalking the mezzanine floor like a panther. And he was single. Especially on snowy days, when Broadhead’s tended to draw capacity crowds, Fulton women stood in line, angling for Jack’s attention. “You could hear his name called right across the store,” says a woman whose grandmother recalled having her eye on Jack and an occasional foot in his hand.
But Jack had his own eye on a pretty, auburn-haired clerk who worked part time on the first floor. Nelle (pronounced “Nellie”) Wilson had recently moved to town from North Clyde, Illinois, a desolate stretch of farmland on the outskirts of the county. She was a delicate wisp of a girl, only seventeen when Jack first spotted her, agreeably self-possessed considering her fractured upbringing, with a high forehead, ghostly pale-blue eyes, and alabaster-white skin.
Like Jack, Nelle descended from a long line of immigrants who had reckoned with their share of trouble, her forebears an amalgam of adventurous, some might say shiftless, men and flinty, Bible-fearing womenfolk. Her grandfather John Wilson, a burly Scotsman, migrated to Canada in the early nineteenth century, eventually drifting south across the border before winding up in North Clyde. There, in 1841, he married Jane Blue and staked a claim to farmland within a short ride of where Michael Reagan’s family lived, in northern Illinois. But farming was too prosaic for such a restless adventurer. Just weeks after his eighth child was born, John Wilson took off with his brother and Jane’s father, Donald, to join the gold rush frenzy in California.